


exaptation

by glassedplanets



Category: Bleach
Genre: Hueco Mundo And Its Food Chain, If You Don't Have Canon Segunda Etapa Store-Bought Is Fine, M/M, Missing Scenes & Vignettes, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Fullbringer Arc, Pre-Slash, Thousand Year Blood War Arc, multiple POVs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28890102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glassedplanets/pseuds/glassedplanets
Summary: Souls colliding in convergent evolutions, hurtling down paths that inch them along threads of infinite possible futures, a tapestry of spark-bright blades.(Missing scenes and other shortfic spanning from the end of the Fullbringer arc onwards.)
Relationships: Aizen Sousuke & Grimmjow Jaegerjaques, Grimmjow Jaegerjaques/Kurosaki Ichigo
Comments: 14
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote these with my other fic, [quema](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28082574), in mind, but this work can be read as a standalone. tags and relationships will be updated as i go, this'll be leaning heavily into grimmjow/ichigo.

The taste of Quincy, Grimmjow learns, is something close to oblivion. Spiritform bloated so richly with reishi that the first time Grimmjow sinks his teeth into some screaming, witless footsoldier, he gags. His body rejects it entirely at the first taste: thick and heavy, laden with every particle of the power they’ve stolen from Hueco Mundo’s very essence, as terribly delicious as it is cloying. It nudges out faint memories buried in the depths of a soul making up the weave of his being: some fat-slicked cut of meat, some repugnant delicacy. Nearly satiation in just one bite.

He tears the next Quincy apart with his claws.

* * *

"Coward," Grimmjow snarls. The arrow in his shoulder burns; he's lost sensation around the three in his gut. He'd never fought Kurosaki's archer himself, but he'd seen the damage done to Cirucci, to Szayelaporro's fracciones-cum-test-subjects, to Las Noches itself. He hadn't seen anything like _this_.

"Like a rabid animal," the man says, and smiles faintly over his glasses. The look in his _eyes_. Grimmjow feels rage burn hotter than the skyshock-blue of reishi flame these Quinces have used to devastate his home. "You'd make such a wonderful specimen for His Majesty, but alas–” He turns away. Grimmjow wants to cleave open his back; he’d tear himself in two with the movement. "–such an attitude will not be tolerated. Please die promptly, Hollow abomination. We'll leave you to it."

The curtain of fire closes behind his back. Grimmjow rips the sparking arrow out of his shoulder and howls his rage. Seconds later another arrow parts the flame to punch clean through his other shoulder, like someone on the other side thinks they've gotten the last word.

Pantera returns to his hand with the fresh surge of pain, her tip resting in the sand. He is filled with frigid fear, surrounded by flame that he has watched devour bone. The arrows dig like shards of glass into his stomach. It's almost thoughtful, the way they've missed the broad scar that stripes his chest. He grabs all three in one hand and shatters them. Pantera wavers; his fingertips shiver and fade to black, just for a second.

This isn't enough. This isn't _it._ He is painted by the weight of shadows cast by his fracciones, solemn. This shape is a farce.

He wants to destroy this false skin and rip himself apart until he can remake himself the way he’s supposed to be, in tooth and claw and sharp eye. The mask on his jaw weighs so heavily it makes him want to scream and so he _does_ , the sand shivering away from him in perfectly circular ripples. Pantera burns in his hand. Reishi-blue fire licks closer. He wants to tear through the world until it can’t hold him anymore. This skin is wrong, all wrong. Fire slinks ever closer, hot enough to incinerate him and scatter every scrap of his souls across the worlds. The air chokes him, worse than anything he's ever felt. His world is dying. This mask feels so heavy. Pantera is so light, like a whisper.

His hand moves as if unburdened.

Pantera's hilt shatters the teeth of his mask; the force of the blow cracks both his jaw and Pantera’s pommel. His own reiryoku flares with such intensity it brings him to his knees, palms sinking into the sand; his breath rasps heavily through the cavity in his chest that mimics lungs.

He stares down at the fragments of his mask between his palms, nestled gently in sand dotted by his own blood. His sword is gone. He’d fallen with it in his hand; it had bruised his palm, the wrecked pommel digging into the meat of his hand. There’s nothing under him now but soft sand. His reiryoku thunders through his body, thick and dense, and he knows this feeling, he _knows_ this feeling, he _knows_ —

It wrenches an animal scream out of him anyways, desperate fear-fuelled fire burning ice-cold through every single particle of reishi that makes up his body. He feels his bones shatter and his own reiatsu explodes to fill each space between the shards; binding through unbearable heat until the next beat of his hollowed-out heart echoes through him like a blow, shattering his bones over again.

His fingertips are velvet black when he is finally capable of enough movement to dig them into the sand beneath him. The forearm before him is free of bone. Emotion rushes through him, untethered, as if the maelstrom comprised of all the souls he’s ever devoured has settled into a chorus rather than an unending scream. He opens his mouth; the scent of reishi, ash, fire, _Quincy_ settles heavy on his tongue alongside bitter iron. Their cloying grasp has permeated everything.

Grimmjow stands on feet that feel more like his own than they have in years. Not even Resurrección has he ever felt so complete. He flexes his hand; Pantera’s steel is echoed in scorched-carbon claws and the resolute tempered flex of his chest as he exhales. He curls his fingers once more into his palm, then out. There’s a sensation under his skin he can’t quite shake. The scar hasn’t ached in years and it still doesn’t now, but the skin over his chest pulls, mnemonic, as he hauls in another breath and looks around.

The superheated flame has guttered out around him, leaving the eternal-night air free to press against his skin, cool with comfort. He’s lost time somewhere, somehow. Doesn’t matter. Persistence is a valuable skill as a predator. The Quincy army is on _his_ turf, not the other way around. He can taste all the wrongnesses where they step, now; all the tiny quivers across Hueco Mundo where reishi moves as it shouldn’t.

Persistence. A new shape. A sharper maw. He’ll whet these claws on anything that stands in his way, destroy them before they destroy _this_. The taste of that Quincy leading them was stagnant, bound, nothing like the endless plunge he saw first through Ulquiorra’s eyes what feels like only days ago, in reality was maybe years ago; no terrifying capacity for growth here. No kind-eyed Soul Reaper with a Hollow’s hunger for him to chase. Just an army of nothing but stale fodder to chew through, and a self-righteous bastard at the top suited only to be the last to fall.

Wind sings gently against his ears as he moves, the air parting before him like water, sand blurring in his vision. There’s a sickly lightness on the horizon, a false dawn birthed by the wrong fire.

When his mask reforms – eventually, after miles and miles and miles have flown by beneath him, drawn back by exhausted rage – it feels light enough to be gossamer.


	2. Chapter 2

Hueco Mundo does not care who or what falls within its grasp; the pale sand laps up offerings regardless of whose blood is spilled.

Grimmjow tosses aside the pitiful remains of a Quincy, and one of the Gillians behind him lunges for it immediately. He’s amassed stragglers like shadows, pitiable scraps of Hollows that cling to his heels only because they know they’re not worth his time, they know he’ll kill every Quincy in Hueco Mundo before he sets his teeth back to Hollow meat, they know he’s the most powerful thing crossing these sands. The Gillian gags and howls over its meal, overcome by how saturated with reishi the blood is.

“Eat it,” he snarls, staring up at its blank mask. There’s a distant spark of recognition in its eyes, close to refinement. Good. There’s an evolution coming soon for this one. “You want to live? Eat it. Or let _them_ –” He jerks his head back at the meandering string of Hollows in his wake, a mix of other Gillians and over-large, clumsy Adjuchas. “–eat you.”

The Gillian mewls and cowers half-protectively over its meal; Grimmjow scoffs in disgust and turns away, tail lashing. (There's no one left to admonish him for the stifling web of reiryoku this release exudes. Precious few left with any of Aizen's numbers. Even those two brainwashed little brats of his are gone somewhere too, maybe even dead by now.)

(And how they’d managed to capture _Halibel_ of all people is baffling. Grimmjow suspects it has to do with that strange critical softness to her, the way she watches her fracciones squabbling when she thinks he can’t see her. It’s what cost Nelliel that very same número. Maybe that’s why they get along.)

One of the Adjuchas – doesn't know their name, doesn't fucking care – slinks up beside him and looks up with a careful eye. They're smaller, with dense reiryoku; they'll be powerful, one day. Maybe they'll make a good meal. Who knows.

"What now?" they ask quietly around a mouth full of teeth.

"I don't give a shit what you do," Grimmjow snaps back. "Just survive."

Their ears flick backwards, just a few degrees.

"I meant, where do we go from here?" Another ear-flick. "They don't stop coming. They keep taking us. Killing us. Using us. What do we do?"

"What do you think?" Grimmjow snarls. "Fucking _survive._ That's the only thing that matters. No one's going to come save you."

The Quincy scouting— no, _hunting_ parties are seemingly endless. He's long lost track of how many he's killed, but he can still feel them crawling over Hueco Mundo's sands like the parasites they are. Doesn't matter. He'll kill 'em all. Hueco Mundo is for _him_ to spill blood in, not anyone else.

The Hollow takes one careful step backwards, and they remark quietly, "You did."

Grimmjow's response (white-hot fury that tastes nothing like fury usually does; an echo of an echo of his fracción treading carefully in his footsteps) is drowned out as the sky cracks open and rains world-ending hellfire.

No. Not quite hellfire.

The epicenter is close to half a world away but Grimmjow is already moving, sonido pushing through miles that aren't adding up to close the distance just yet. That danger-hot reiryoku is muffled now, down to just an aftertaste, but unmistakable. Bright and heady, a taste he could never forget even if every one of his souls was scattered to the wind.

Nelliel is back. And she brought Kurosaki.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was done before the first one, i just kept forgetting to post it. SHRUG


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> takes place between ch. 479 and ch. 480

Ichigo catches a flash of winter-sky blue and stark white against the heavy gray clouds over Seireitei and his chest seizes.

It’s just a scarf wrapped jauntily around a distant Soul Reaper’s neck patterned in large, cheerful squares meeting a bright pennant lifted just barely in the breeze to make the shape of a long-lost ghost. 

The immediate rush of adrenaline eases. The ache burrows deeper. 

It had been almost easy, at first, to lose his powers. Sort of paradoxical. He’d lost something that had made a wall between himself and others for his entire life. Life had just gone on, with a sensation close to optimism. Move on, follow the old worn patterns of school-clubs-study-sleep. Move on. Move on. Move on till the cracks are too big to ignore. 

Crowds of strangers had been the worst, at the beginning. The hardest to pretend the cracks didn’t exist. Walking home and seeing a flash of dark hair falling like Rukia’s; the cut of someone’s jaw on the train, far too much like Renji’s; the neat broad line of shoulders like Byakuya’s. (But never as imposing. Not ever.) A flash of pale bone masquerading as a hat, a phone, a necklace. He’d had friends move away when he was younger, and friends who went to different schools; the hurt is the same, somehow. Maybe it should have been worse, and the fact that it wasn’t had made it all that much harder. (It was fine, until it wasn’t. But only later had he realized it really, really wasn’t.)

Looking at his friends had been like looking at mannequins, like walking around with husks instead of the people he loved, even though rationally he _knew_ nothing had changed with them, he _knew_ the bright lively pulse of their souls continued to beat onward. Watching them sprint out of class to chase down something he could neither see nor hear nor feel, watching Chad’s bruises vanish in the blink of an eye, watching Uryu tuck a slender chain down his immaculate sleeve, watching Orihime gently fix the pins in her hair. They were fine. He knew. Underneath the faux tarps of their bodies, they were fine. He'd learned to trust in that until one frantic phone call and a trip to the hospital had upended everything. 

But they’re back. They’re back. His friends are back. 

(They were never gone, though, he thinks; he remembers Rukia’s voice, or maybe Renji’s, so long ago under a dark sky, asking _why didn’t you wait? Why couldn’t you trust us?_ And he knows with certainty that he did, he does, he will. Always.)

—and now he’s winding through the old strange streets of Seireitei, Renji and Rukia shoulder to shoulder ahead of him, but every soul he passes pulls the wires tighter around his chest. What else has he missed? What else has changed? If a Hollow dies, where does it go? If a Menos Grande, Gillian, Adjuchas, Arrancar is a concentrated mass of souls all distilled down into a container that looks almost human, where does it go? _Where does it go?_

He walks past the delicate line of a Soul Reaper’s hand gesturing through a conversation and aches. Those fingers could have belonged to someone else. They might have been part of a lethal black Cero that ripped him open. Are the scraps of Ulquiorra’s soul here somewhere? Is Ichigo going to be haunted by those calm, clear eyes if he turns the wrong corner? By the liquid grin on Nnoitra’s face, or the crack of Yammy's voice?

The cool winter air feels thin. What if Nel is dead? What if whatever chaos Hueco Mundo descended into without Aizen killed her, killed her brothers, left her alone and vulnerable with a half-cracked mask? What if—

A flash of teeth. A streak of teal. (The wrong laugh, the wrong face, the wrong slouch, everything else is wrong.) 

He never got the chance to make good on his offer to Grimmjow. The ludicrousness of it nearly stops him in his tracks. An echo of what he felt hearing Yammy talk about the Espadas at the end of things fills him with an odd, empty rage; the anger of a connection mocked, however tenuous it might have been. Grimmjow had been a ferocious opponent, nearly as perfect of a fight as Ichigo could have ever asked for, more than worthy of clawing his way to the top of Hueco Mundo’s food chain. And Nnoitra – he’d been a scumbag, that much was clear, but Yammy’s callous disrespect of them both had still rung sour. They were still _people_. Their memories haunt him just as thoroughly: the raw edge of Grimmjow’s blade pinning his wrists to cold concrete and the half-terrified, exhausted disgust on his face the last time Ichigo saw him in a harried glance over his shoulder. The sensation of Ulquiorra’s fingertips punching through his chest; the cold slide of his tail around Ichigo’s neck; the soft, defeated curiosity in his eyes when he’d stretched a crumbling hand out towards Orihime. Nel’s proud, tall back before him.

He has a sword now. He has his friends now. There’s time to fix these things now. It’s starting to sink in. There's time. 

Rukia throws him a brief look over her shoulder; he smiles back, and watches her lips quirk up as she looks ahead and nudges Renji. There’s _time_. All the time in the world. He can catch up with his friends, he can come back to Soul Society whenever he wants, he can see everyone and sense everyone and _protect everyone_ again.

There's time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (there isn't)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> takes place after ch. 684

With each breath he takes, he dies and is reborn.

Grimmjow lies on his side, panting like an animal, for far too long. It’s the second most painful thing he’s ever experienced. The first was walking across this shitty broken city, Urahara’s neverending stitches trailing him, getting ripped apart by poison with each individual contraction of muscle fiber, being sewn back together on the release.

He hauls himself up onto his hands and knees, eventually, somehow, elbows locked and trembling, and then manages to push back onto his haunches. He clings to his Resurrección with stubborn desperation. The familiarity of this shape is grounding enough to be worth the drain on his energy.

He’s hungry. Fuck, he’s so hungry. The amount of warm bodies full of reiryoku around him is making his mouth water. It’s not the poison-soaked half-corpses just an arm’s length away; it’s the dangerous flickers of power just at the edges of his awareness that make his claws itch under the blood drying tacky on them. And it's _him_.

It's fucked up. Twice now in all his consumed lives he's lain on the ground, close to death, with no choice but to _feel_ as Kurosaki's blinding storm of reiryoku turns hungry and familiar, as he climbs with heated claws onto the meticulous rungs of will-it-eat-me by which Grimmjow has organized his thoughts since the first soul making up his body met the second.

Unfair. Un-fucking-fair. He's so damn hungry that his teeth hurt. Consciousness crawls away from him; he chases it doggedly. Nelliel's familiar cool pinprick weave of souls is far enough away from the core that it isn't entirely consumed by the solar-wind storm of Kurosaki's strength, though even that is starting to wane. The pulse of that tiny kid she'd whisked away on Urahara's request is steadying slowly beside her, bolstered by the familiar backwards flow of that human girl.

He gouges his claws into the crumbling cement of the roof beneath him. There's no point being here anymore. It's long past time to grab Nelliel by the scruff of her too-kind neck and go back to where they're actually needed. He opens his mouth to demand that Urahara's bankai stop lingering under his skin when the sun at the center of this system shifts to eclipse him.

Gravity adjusts. Reishi carries half-familiar scents along with Kurosaki's arrival: Nelliel, the other humans, the Soul Reapers who killed his fracción. Other scents he doesn't know and doesn't care about. All suspended in the miasma of Kurosaki's being.

And Kurosaki — Grimmjow expects more of the same thing he saw earlier, a rush to Urahara and Yoruichi, a spill of vulnerable words, a renewal of that fiery hero complex that seems to drive him, but Kurosaki just stares. At Grimmjow.

His eyes are empty. He looks like something's been carved out of him.

He takes a step closer, obliquely; they're almost side to side. Kurosaki stands above him, but there's nothing in his eyes even close to looking down. Hunger lashes painfully through Grimmjow's chest, but he can't bring himself to bare his teeth to something that already looks so defeated.

Kurosaki rests his hand on Grimmjow's shoulder. It's agony. Urahara's bankai dutifully repairs the raw skin that Kurosaki's palm is resting on unthinkingly even as the weight of his reiryoku, oddly unstable, rakes over it like sandpaper.

"You're alive," Kurosaki says. His voice is quiet, like he's incapable of raising it.

"Check on your friends," Grimmjow rasps back, "not me."

He looks pointedly over at where Yoruichi is lying in a heap of limbs; sluggishly, Kurosaki follows his gaze. Urahara had draped the remaining scraps of his coat over her, gently worked her arms through the half-torn sleeves; it'd been nauseating to watch, far too tender, too much open intimacy in murmured apologies. She's twitching in her unconsciousness, all that livewire electricity still coursing unspent through her body. Urahara keeps his hand gently on her forehead through each pained movement. It's almost repulsive.

Kurosaki’s exhale is slow and ragged. Grimmjow’s skin prickles, a feeling entirely unrelated to the sutures still running through it.

Maybe Hollows are too full of souls, Grimmjow thinks. Maybe they’re too full of souls and that’s why they repel each other, why they don’t succumb to this awful weakness of Soul Reapers and humans. Maybe humans are too empty, just one soul rattling around for all of eternity. Maybe this touch that doesn’t end lives, this gentle draw of Urahara’s fingertips over sweat-soaked skin, is the reason they don’t devour each other, the reason they don’t succumb to the howling void and destroy and consume until it’s all one never-ending storm and there’s no room for anything else.

Maybe. But his jaw still aches with how much he wants to sink his teeth into the soft expanse of Kurosaki's neck and have all of that raging strength to himself.

He never got the fight he came here for. Not really. Ripping someone's beating heart out of their chest isn't much of a fight, however satisfying it may be. But Kurosaki is bracing his weight on Grimmjow's shoulder like it's something he thinks he can do, like he thinks they're _friends_ , and Grimmjow wants to snap back with all the feral might lying unspent in his bones, wants to crack his wrist in half and lay open each of his ribs until he can find that Hollow mask in his depths.

Kurosaki looks down at him again with that scraped-out look still in his eyes, and Grimmjow snarls. He reaches up, swaying with the movement, his skin tearing open and ripping shut, bruises blooming and fading in seconds, and wraps his hand around Kurosaki’s wrist. His claws draw blood.

To his credit, Kurosaki doesn’t flinch. He reads the motion for what it is and shifts his weight; his palm reciprocates, broad and far too hot even against the bone encasing Grimmjow’s wrist, and he pulls Grimmjow to his feet. The motion feels like it nearly rips him in half.

“Next time I see you,” Grimmjow grinds out, “I’m gonna kill you. Mark my words.”

The emptiness in his eyes flickers and fills, just a touch; it’s a shadow of the stare that sparked a fire in Grimmjow’s chest on an empty street in the Living World, but it’s something. Grimmjow hasn’t let go of his wrist and he can feel blood welling up between his fingers, hot and liquid. Kurosaki has made no move to free himself; his grip in return is almost bruising, but unconsciously so.

“That a promise?” Kurosaki asks.

It's a promise and it's more. It’s the numbness in the scar across his chest. It's knowing there is no novelty to be found in the commonplace give of soft tender flesh under his teeth and claws, and wanting Kurosaki at his mercy anyways. It’s the threat of daring to want even that.

"Yes," he snarls, and digs his claws in deeper.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter leans a bit into the events of [quema](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28082574), though it can stand alone - the tl;dr on the world state is post-series, the soul reaper and remaining arrancar agree to move peacefully between worlds. what happens between the end of quema and this is reader's choice. (fingerguns)

There is no echo of footsteps nor subsonic thrum of reishi that heralds an arrival. The familiar presence – oh, the taste of the Hōgyoku still lingers so deliciously upon this knot of souls – only slinks towards him, silent, before coming to a halt at the far end of the chamber.

His visitor can likely see from that far away; he can most definitely hear and smell, even the slightest changes in his breath or pulse. There's no mistaking his distance for caution learned after a lifetime of recklessness – more likely disgust, simple fear, and the unending clever arrogance that has extended his life for this long.

Aizen expands his reiatsu until it presses up against the edge of his Espada's, meeting alarmed but unsurprised resistance, and then pushes on. He can sense the yawning lack of heart, frigid and crackling reiryoku held resolutely taut against this intrusion, the familiar anticipatory lick of tongue against teeth, unendingly hungry. And lain deeper, like a buried vein of gold, is—

_Interesting_.

"Grimmjow," he says, speaking as if they were standing no further than an arm's length away. "What a welcome surprise."

Reiryoku flickers in response to the lie. Yes, the feeling is akin to inclusions. Not merely the superficial mix of others' reiryoku like oil on water – the brush of the Soul Reapers he would have passed to get here, the more substantial weight of Halibel and Nelliel – but a deeper tangle, oxygen suspended in amber.

Their conversation remains silent as Aizen withdraws; not even the echo of a breath passes between them when Grimmjow's reiryoku warps, lashing out just once on instinct.

Oh, what he wouldn't give for a better look at what this creature has become, to take him apart all over again and rearrange all his components like a puzzle. Aizen lets the silence unfurl between them in peace, keeping his reiryoku leashed. It behooves him to be a polite host, after all.

Though _why_ his Arrancar is allowed to walk here, to visit him in the stillest depths of Muken, is an equally compelling puzzle. Even this far down, he’s been able to sense the ebb and flow of Soul Society’s power; he felt the shift in the way the worlds rubbed together, the slow thinning of the walls between Soul Society and Hueco Mundo, the gentle crawl of Hollows into this territory. That alone is no surprise. Hollows and Soul Reapers and Quincies all working together to take down Yhwach… this is an inevitable step. The only real question is why one of his Espadas is allowed to visit him; the only likely culprit is one Kurosaki Ichigo.

Said Espada is motionless at the other end of the chamber, his physical form is as still as a dead thing, as prey in sight of a predator. His reiryoku is carefully sheathed. Show me again, Aizen thinks. Let me see what you have become. Let me see what he's done to you in return.

And so Aizen lowers himself to Grimmjow's standards and _pushes_. He can only manage a fraction of what he's truly capable of; even still, this is the same trivial amount of pressure that once brought Grimmjow to his knees.

Grimmjow's response is feral and frigid. His reiryoku is a fractured, sharp-edged whirlwind, an explosion of rage masquerading as indignation. Aizen ignores the howled warning in the ragged shards that lash back against him, and pushes further. It's not hard to slip past all that bluster. Or, rather, it shouldn't be; his restraints make it more difficult than it was before. He should have broken Grimmjow immediately and lain him open to inspect like nothing more than a seed.

Even so, with one final demeaning effort he reaches into that repulsive core of souls and stretches out his senses. The impressions he's searching for line Grimmjow's being like footsteps in soft earth – the edge of a blade, the ghost of breath against his skin, the heat of fingers digging deep into muscle, each mark silhouetted in deep, soft black, a color that exists only just after sunset. _Ah._ Kurosaki indeed.

A sound finally fills the room: a growl, soft, not born in the throat of anything near to human.

He's hit a nerve, then. Aizen smiles and withdraws. Silence crawls slowly back into the chamber once the rumbling echo starts to fade. He's content to wait. Grimmjow will doubtless need to gather himself.

But then Grimmjow's presence– it doesn't _move_ so much as it's simply behind him between one splinter of time and the next.

"Kurosaki told me they can't stop your heart," comes his voice over Aizen's shoulder. He doesn't turn his neck to look; he doesn't need to, nevermind that he cannot, restrained as he is. Kurosaki, Kurosaki, of course. Of _course_.

"It's true," Aizen replies. "They've done their best with Muken and this chair, this chamber. Commendable, I suppose."

"They can't stop your heart," Grimmjow continues, "but that doesn't mean I couldn't tear your throat out."

It doesn't. Aizen says nothing.

"You Soul Reaper," Grimmjow purrs behind his ear, like the word is the most abjectly disgusting curse, "you usurper, you fucking trespasser." Cold claws test the seam of the bonds around his neck and then slide through, slide in, press against his skin. So the Twelfth Division never thought to make these bonds impervious to a Hollow. Fascinating. "They can't stop your heart, but I could crack open your bones." His claws are perfectly still against Aizen's skin. Air moves against his cheek. "Your marrow would taste as rotten as the rest of you, but I'd still eat it all."

Aizen feels his pulse quicken by precisely two beats per minute. And yet – no, this cannot be fear. That would be absurd. The simple thrill of curiosity, perhaps.

The reiatsu surrounding him closes like jaws. Sharp teeth bite at his wrists, his neck, raking against the tender flesh of his stomach even through all the layers of dampeners and restraints, piercing down to the core the way only an apex predator can. His pulse, once more, rises by one beat per minute. Grimmjow’s claws do not move from their position, thumb against his jugular, index against his windpipe. And then the pressure is gone, along with Grimmjow’s presence.

“I won’t, though.” His voice comes from halfway across the chamber this time, fading with movement. “You’re not a fighter, you’re a thinker. This place is the best thing they could’ve done to you.” And the slavering teeth of his reiatsu return, parted in a madman’s grin. “Think yourself into oblivion, Lord Aizen. It’s the least you deserve.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is about all i've got for now! thank you for reading.


End file.
